Vanished Years (20 page)

Not so long ago these forests were scattered with little hamlets. Cut off from the outside world, inhabited by wild, inbred humans, half animal, with unfathomable guttural accents. They surfaced from time to time in the market places of La Garde-Freinet or Draguignan, but they lived and died in the wild, collecting mysteries and legends around them. Blue murder must have gone on, as they roamed the Valley of Hell, day in, day out, year after year, doing just enough to make ends meet, fucking their daughters and killing their wives.

Bruno appeared at a window, leaning on the sill and acting like a local girl. Actually he fitted right in. He looked like a miniature witch, with his beaky nose and long hair. Soon he and Tom were
playing houses while I rolled my eyeballs and explored the rest of the gulley. The last house had a roof. A big oak tree was squeezing it to death with its roots. Soon it would be dragged back into the earth, this village, and there was a strange deadly atmosphere that couldn’t be budged by Bruno’s shrieks or Tom’s caustic replies from the top of the hill. Down at the bottom, huge mosquitoes with the longest legs danced in the shafts of light. I imagined being with Alfo there.

Suddenly I shivered; someone was walking on my grave. I felt one of those weird surges of foreboding, and adrenalin shot through my body. The oak groaned in a gust of wind and I ran from the house, terrified, only to find Bruno laughing hysterically at his windowsill, and Tom marching furiously up the path, towards the road.

‘What’s the matter?’ I asked, running to catch up.

‘Nothing,’ said Tom, white with rage. Bruno’s laughter bounced around the valley.

‘Imagine waking up next to that every morning,’ I ventured naughtily.

‘Precisely,’ retorted Tom, giving nothing away.

Back on the road, we hit the autoroute with a tangible atmosphere in the car. Tom glowered in the back and Bruno stared crazily at the road ahead, eyes like saucers, hair flying in the wind. Occasionally manic giggles bubbled from his mouth, and Tom snorted in the back. Soon the Alpes-Maritimes appeared through the morning haze and, with them, the promise of Italy. They became clearer and clearer, and what at first seemed to be jagged clouds were in fact their snowy peaks, high above the mountains themselves, suspended and barely distinguishable from the hot white sky. On the plains below, the vast cities of holiday flats, pink and beige, stretched from the sea to the hills, occasionally crowned by an ancient fortified village climbing out of the urban sprawl, a sinking ship in a sea of roofs and windows with a castle on the top.

We sped over a hill and suddenly the bay of Cannes appeared below us, fringed by its long yellow beach. It was tiny and far away. Matchstick figures walked along the Croisette. Most of my life’s
victories had been grasped there, but now it just flashed past. The autoroute curved around the city towards Nice, past Juan-les-Pins, Cap Ferrat and Antibes. I had read about these places in Oscar Wilde, Scott Fitzgerald and David Niven, and they were sacred to me. Now they were nothing more than ugly
favelas
: beach clubs and fish restaurants, villas and flats that had once, not so very long ago, been one of the most enchanted places on earth, where lonely hotels hid in the woods, and Oscar cruised for fisher boys, and Scott conceived Dick Diver. Now, a sprawling city was Californicating before our very eyes, from Marseilles to Menton. It would be the European Union’s Los Angeles. Downtown Côte d’Azur. You could feel it coming as you surfed the
autoroute
towards the frontier.

And so we flew along the Corniche, the best road in the world, cut high into the side of the mountains, disappearing into its endless dark tunnels, winding snakes with spines of orange lights. The claustrophobia of the sudden enclosure and the roar of the engine thrilled and terrified one into losing control of the car, screeching around corners, the notion of death as close as the perspiring rock walls with their giant white arrows pointing towards the faraway speck of light. The smell of rubber and diesel; the need for absolute concentration; the notion of travel, of history, of the anticipated love tryst; plus the very fact that we were all there, and that it was all there for us, falling away as we hurled ourselves into the glaring sunshine was as intoxicating a journey as I ever took. Outside there were steep rocks on one side, a precipice on the other. Far below, the terraces of vines, and the remains of the Italian Riviera, squeezed between sky-rise flats and a glittering sea. It reminded one of cheap accordion music and all those American films made in the sixties,
The Yellow Rolls-Royce, The Roman Spring of Mrs Stone
. Forget ancient Rome. My references were Shirley MacLaine and Alain Delon in the port at Positano.

As we approached Genoa cargo ships converged out of the haze from all directions as if dragged by a magnet towards the sprawling city, but we bore left and were soon in the forests of Liguria, where
the sleek Corniche degenerated into the road from Wacky Races, bridging wide valleys on dangerous-looking stilts. Castles stood on crags and rivers foamed in deep gorges. It was a perilous ballet, driving on the Italian
autostrada
, with its chorus of lorries, belching evil black smoke, overtaking one another on hairpin bends, its prima ballerinas on motorbikes in shiny black helmets jeté-ing at the speed of light through the traffic. Little stupas at the side of the road made of blackened plastic flowers were the mute testaments to these hazardous highways.

We had coffee in an
auto-stop
. Bruno went to the bathroom.

‘What’s going on with you two?’ I asked.

Tom was silent for a moment.

‘I told Bruno I loved him, and he just burst out laughing.’ Tom smoked furiously.

‘Well, I suppose it is quite funny,’ I ventured, carefully. ‘I mean, he’s a pixie really. Not quite human. It would be like having a pet squirrel. You can never tame a squirrel.’

‘Yuh,’ agreed Tom, blowing smoke and grinding out his cigarette.

‘Let alone fuck one.’

He giggled at the idea, and then we both began to laugh.

‘Tight, eh?’

‘Yuh.’

Turin sits at the foot of the Alps. After the rest of Italy, with its dusty medieval piazzas, its looted church façades of bare bricks, its campaniles and its crumbling palazzos, Rococo Turin seems strained and self-conscious. It is the city of Fiat and the home of the Agnelli dynasty. The local dialect is the first chilling indication of the terrifying mountain twang you will hear as you proceed up the hill into Switzerland.

Alfo met us at the station, dressed up like a teddy bear. I had seen him only in shorts, and suddenly he was a normal person, his breathtaking body reduced to a cube in a sweater and trousers. Nervous in this new environment, conversation lurched and stumbled, and we
jerked through the city to Melody’s flat where Tom and Bruno were staying. We dropped them off, and drove on to his place.

Alfo’s home was on the third floor of a fascist block of flats. You could see the Alps from the long exterior landings that stretched across the building. Front doors, bicycles and pots of flowers were scattered along them with a communal loo at the end. Nothing had changed in Alfo’s flat since the war. It was a large bedsit, really, and the last place I would have imagined him living. There was a huge old bed with round posts and a carved headboard, a stained-oak wardrobe, and a chest of drawers with a pretty gilt mirror on top. The walls were a faded green with damp patches by the ceiling and there was a threadbare rug on the tiled floor. A little kitchenette hid behind a screen, with an old sink and a single gas ring. No bathroom or toilet. You had to brave the freeze in winter and nip down the passage to the privy. It was the flat of a little old lady with a body-builder superimposed upon it, and another brilliant vista on a journey packed, so far, with visual thrills.

Alfo lay on the bed talking to his brother on the telephone. The light was vague and honey-coloured through the closed shutters. It was deliciously cool. The pre-war fan over the bed whirred and clanked. I sat on a dowager’s chair, unsure in this new territory of my next move. Alfo watched me as he talked, smiling. The loo at the end of the passage flushed, a door slammed and footsteps shuffled past.

Dinner that night was a predictable screaming match between Bruno and the sisters of Turin, a light opera performed at a rather grand restaurant in the centre of town. How
les
girls loved a young boy with a strong effeminate streak. Like vampires, they clustered round him. They wanted him for one of their own. They pinched his cheeks and played with his hair. They lifted his chin and scrutinised his features. Bruno loved the attention. He was always their target and had been chased from Alsace to Austin, Texas, but they always misunderstood. He was an elf trapped in a man’s body, not a woman. Actually, shrouded beneath the shrieks and the semi-broken voice,
he had a gigantic male ego, as I was to discover to my cost over the years. But he happily played along, as one tigress whipped his hair into a majestic chignon, and another wrapped a shawl around his shoulders.

Melody observed from one end of the table with a detached aristocratic smile (‘Moaner Lisa,’ whispered Tom) while we watched her from the other. She winked, pointed to Alfo and made a sexy pout. That man was out of sync with the evening, lost in thought, sad and beautiful, just the type of boy I liked; a stranger, it would seem, even at home. Doriano, his friend, the other boy of unimaginable beauty, looked at him strangely, and there was a curious undertow beneath the bursts of applause from the screaming menagerie, as we all got drunker and drunker, and the room began to spin. Our numbers doubled as various freaks from the scene joined the table, nightclub recluses, a steroid dealer and a bent
carabiniere
. A tubby patrician poof with a silk handkerchief in his breast pocket leered over Tom and me with wild watery eyes and a high breathy voice.

‘You like Torino? Is first time here? Be veeeery careful. We are crazy peoples.’

Luckily Tom had recovered his sense of humour. He watched Bruno with a bemused smile, and that enormous sense of relief one sometimes encounters when love’s light switch is suddenly snapped off.

‘Maybe it’s a good thing Bruno didn’t say yes,’ I ventured cautiously. ‘You might have found yourself going out with a woman next week.’

‘Well, that beats a squirrel.’

‘They’d both have your nuts.’

Alfo shut the door behind him and leant against it. He didn’t turn on the lights. I stumbled in the dark towards the huge old bed and threw myself down on it, knowing by now that something substantial was about to happen. The springs creaked under my weight. The grainy thick darkness began to subside, a black tide out of which
appeared the cupboard, the table, the screen, then Alfo himself, carved in a ghostly light from the street. His eyes were black holes, and the sadness that I had noticed in him at dinner was distilled now that we were back here. A strange feeling of dread surged through my whole body.

‘I have something to tell you,’ he said, but didn’t go on.

After a minute he walked over to the bed and lay down carefully. For a while we just lay there side by side, not moving, not touching, and time stood still. It felt as though the whole room had turned in on us. The furniture watched, the bed cradled us with tenderness, and the universe held its breath until, almost imperceptibly at first, Alfo began to shake. He held his hand over his brow, as if that gesture might somehow quell the storm rising inside, but with a sudden gasp tears began to pour down his face, dripping off his long lashes onto the pillow. Then he cried and cried, with great heaving sobs. Sometimes he tried to speak but he couldn’t and anyway he didn’t really need to, because I knew what he was going to say. So I cried too. At first for him, then for us, and finally, as the full implication of this wordless confession settled, for myself. For some reason I remembered a line from a play in Glasgow, badly delivered by an overweight cockney ham.

‘See, see, where Christ’s blood streams in the firmament.’

Later Alfo switched on the bedside lamp. It had a medium’s shade with tassels. Estranged by the light, we tried to talk, but there weren’t any words to express the sorrow and anxiety, the guilt and fear of one man telling another that he harbours a killer virus. He knew what it would mean to me. I knew what it already meant to him, and I fought the desire to get up, then and there, and run. Alfo caught the mad glint in my eyes and asked if I wanted to go to a hotel. We were stripped of all artifice and there were no more secrets. In the pool of light from the medium’s lamp, he was vulnerable, beautiful, simple, living and dying in the same breath, and I couldn’t answer. So we just looked at each other and he smiled. Suddenly, without warning, we were in love and everything fell
away. A door opened in space. He held out his hand to help me through. I hesitated. I always do.

Aids followed us around like a shadow in those early days, another vampire on the scene that killed with a kiss. So far I had dodged the grim reaper’s scythe that had disembowelled so many of my friends, but my nerves were in shreds as a result, and my terror of this disease had become psychotic. I was still infinitely suggestible to all those urban legends propagated by the Christians and Conservatives concerning toilet seats, handshakes, knives and forks, and Alfo and I had done slightly more than share a dessertspoon, although our contact had been largely romantic. On the other hand, during our brief clumsy forays into sex, we had used a pack of condoms from a Christmas cracker produced by Tom on the night of our engagement. How far away that evening seemed now. A dot of light at one end of a long tunnel. At the other – the oncoming train. Tied to the tracks, we held onto each other and cried ourselves to sleep.

I woke fully clothed early the next morning. In that first moment of consciousness there was no trace of the evening’s drama. I looked at the cupboard and the bed and the damp green walls, and wondered for a second where I was, but then everything tumbled into place. Our tragedy was scrawled all over the flat. Everything had changed. If this was a film, I remember thinking, it would now turn black and white. Or would it be colour? Alfo’s face on the pillow, as he slept, was a picture of health. The morning traffic rumbled outside. Those long lashes vibrated slightly under his thick brows and his large ribcage rose and fell, the swell of an ocean upon which sleep was a ship of fools, rolling towards the rocks of another day. There seemed to be a new dimension to his beauty. Now it was miraculous, and tragic. There but not there. Poignant, fragile and fleeting, because sometime in the near future it would be stretched on the rack, disfigured and broken, made unrecognisable to itself.